Tawantinsuyo was the Quechua name for the Inca Empire, the pre-Columbian empire that ruled present Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador and parts of Colombia, Argentina and Chile, before the Spanish arrived to America.

A free interactive historical map it’s something hard to find in Peru, so a young engineer made the first map of this kind for the Inca Empire. I interviewed him to find out his motivations and goals with this project. Apart from that I talked with an archaeologist friend to know about his views on the potential of this kind of maps for historians and other academics.

I would post the whole article here but it is a bit too long, so I am copying the first three parragraphs and then putting the link to the Medium post, you can read it complete there. Thanks!

Mapping the Tawantinsuyo in OpenHistoricalMap

A few days ago I found about the existence of a platform called OpenHistoricalMap and that someone there had made a Tawantinsuyo map. Given my interest in historical issues, especially if they are related to the Inca Empire, I decided to contact whoever had this interesting idea.

That was how I virtually met Rubén López, a young systems engineer, graduated from the University of Huamanga, who works -like other local people- in Development Seed, a global company that provides geospatial solutions and has an office in Ayacucho, Peru, and where this Peruvian team develops map applications.

One of the projects they support is precisely OpenHistoricalMap, and Rubén sees the part of server architecture through docker and kubernetes technologies in AWS. The project is similar to OpenStreetMap, with the difference that OpenHistoricalMap stores historical data. This data is accessible with a free license for its use, that is, any person or organization can use this data for jobs, websites or others.

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